Kickstarter Game of the Week: Warriors of Jogu: Feint

Warriors of Jogu is a 2-player game of deduction and hidden information. Players each know the location of one of two different battle locations. They must deploy their units–represented by cards–on the board in order to strengthen their presence at each of the battle locations. Because you only know one of the battle locations for certain, it’s up to you to deduce where the second battle location is, based on your opponent’s moves. In addition, you’ve got to be careful with how you play your own cards because, while you want to strengthen your presence in the battle location you know for certain, you don’t want to give that location away! It’s an interesting blend of bluffing and deduction that has some other fantastic mechanics as well – unique player powers in the form of five different factions, and an element of press-your-luck in the form of morale value (the more units you play during a losing round, the more morale you lose… and you don’t want your morale to drop to zero!)

Warriors of Jogu also features some fantastic artwork! It has an almost video-game like quality that reminds me of some of the great classic Japanese battle games like Dynasy Warriors, or even as far back as the SNES game Gemfire (kudos if you even know what I’m talking about since it’s a pretty obscure title). I’m loving the differences between the different factions, as well. Each has its own cards with different abilities, a different feel and flavor, and of course, its own artwork.

There’s the Guards of Keion who are strong but not so great at the bluffing game, there’s the Gang of Mibits who are a bit on the weak side but can move around after they’re deployed in order to change up how the player bluffs and maneuvers, there’s Tribe Wu who can spring an ambush on the battle locations but suffer greater penalties to morale, there’s the League of Agents who can deploy hidden but have a disadvantage in their strength to morale ratio, and there’s the Society of Engineers who have high strength static tower units, but have somewhat restricted deployment.

I’m getting extra excited for Warriors of Jogu because, now that’s it’s funded, there’s a plethora of sweet stretch goals for us to unlock, including linenized cards and custom faction-specific morale tokens! As of writing this, there’s 11 days left in the campaign, so if it sounds like something that’s up your alley, be sure to check out the Kickstarter campaign!